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If it's immersion breaking to reset to level 1 for the sequel then surely it's immersion breaking to start at level 1 to begin with. Why does Eder start at lowest level when he's a war veteran?

And Aloth, who continue to be in adventures between the two games forgot all the higher level spells.

Zahua used to be a warrior chieftain and was briefly completely invincible as the Anitlei. Pallegina is a paladin in service to the Vailian Ducs who spends her life in battle. Why are they both exactly as good in combat as a drifter from Old Vailia who wandered into the wrong ruin during a storm?

All good points.

Well, I would say this is more about the feel of continuity, than immersion in this particular case.

After all, my hero have developed in some speciffic way in PoE 1 (well, for someone who for example didn't play first part this is totaly different story, I guess). And also his friends have chosen some speciffic paths of their own.

I would also argue, that while our companions in the first game were not "blank cards", so to speak, they were also not that special. One can say, that Eder was only one of many veterans, Pallegina one of many "brothers" and so on. Well, maybe Durance was somewhat special. Anyway, by the end of the story they all are also heros, right? They could single-handly kill a dragon by this point... Or maybe not...

EDIT: Oh, and our own hero wasn't "blank card" either, btw. With Odema points out on the begining of the game. He could be some mercenery, for example - hence he can have same or greater combat experience than Eder. END-of-EDIT.

When it comes to "classes", I have troubles with understanding them from the first game. What I mean by this, is should I treat them as purely mechanical solution, or as a kind of "proffesions" or "ways of life" that actualy exists on Eora (especially, that we separatly choose our background)? In the same way, what should I think about all the skills, talents and powers my hero and his companions learn during their adventures? In practice, at least some classes, or even powers (like spells) have responsivity in both games' dialoges options, or events. But for the most part they seems to only designate how our hero (and his companions) deal with combat situations. And out of combat, all those classes somewhat (for the most part) stops to exist.

Anyway, I would like to point out, that this is not some major problem for me - devastating my game's experience, or something like that. But I simply say, that totaly new story wouldn't have this problem.

From other hand, I can appreciate that I can import my old hero from PoE 1 to Deadfire and to meet some old friends. And as I wrote, I don't have problems with this from role-playing perspective.

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You can only do half the stuff in the main quest because you're a Watcher, so using a different character but changing nothing else about the main quest requires an entirely separate Watcher, and keeping the Eothas statue just raises the question of what happened to the previous Watcher

I dont think that's right. You can do everything but the last quest for each faction and few other choices in sidequests. That's not enough to warrant constant playthroughs. Just save near the end.

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I remember when first reading about the game, I swear it mentioned the game would start at Defiance Bay and you would have to secure your own boat etc to sail off after Eothas - I thought that would be really cool, and think that is a good way to start a sequel - it would have been fun to cruise around Dyrwood a little.

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I think lots of people don't like the plot because it's a goes against genre expectations. If they played up the guardian of Ukaizo more and Eothas killing people less it might be more liked. I think it will wind up as a Far Cry 2 style situation, where in ten years it will be useful as a discussion piece about the genre.

As for the exploring aspect, the islands were too siloed/isolated/modular. As an example, I think they mechanically exceeded Raedric's Keep with the piano bomb quest, but like most of the quests it had a really weak lead-in. There was no Gilded Vale to make crushing Captain Benwick seem necessary. There weren't many times that one quest led to another quest, and extremely few quests that took players to multiple islands. That meant that a lot of times you didn't see minor consequences for minor actions. There was also no reason to go back to a place once you cleared the quests you got that took you there.

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I think lots of people don't like the plot because it's a goes against genre expectations. If they played up the guardian of Ukaizo more and Eothas killing people less it might be more liked. I think it will wind up as a Far Cry 2 style situation, where in ten years it will be useful as a discussion piece about the genre.

As for the exploring aspect, the islands were too siloed/isolated/modular. As an example, I think they mechanically exceeded Raedric's Keep with the piano bomb quest, but like most of the quests it had a really weak lead-in. There was no Gilded Vale to make crushing Captain Benwick seem necessary. There weren't many times that one quest led to another quest, and extremely few quests that took players to multiple islands. That meant that a lot of times you didn't see minor consequences for minor actions. There was also no reason to go back to a place once you cleared the quests you got that took you there.

One thing that's super accurate here is the contrarian nature of Deadfire's writing. This really became apparent doing a second playthrough. But the writers just seem over-eager to always go against type. One example of this is the abundance of monster type creatures who are actually intelligent and can be civilized. This kind of twist works well with restraint. For example, Viconia stands out in BG, especially to DnD fans, partly because she's the only classically evil being that you can recruit. But in Deadfire this kind of twist is used ad nauseam -- there's an ogre you can recruit, a xaurip, an imp, a vithrack you can reason with, a lagufaeth you can reason with and on and on.

For one it kills the special nature that these twists would have had in a more restrained game. If there were only one or two non-kith crew members, that would make them special. Second, it also breaks much of the previous world building. If these "monsters" so frequently become civilized, why are there so many hostile, wild groups of them? Third, it's a cheap trick to make a quest, encounter or NPC interesting.

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The general idea of wilder seems to be that they're all just fundamentally incompatible with being "kith" in whatever way. Xaurips and lagufaeth in particular clearly occupy a space between ape and human on the intelligence scale and wouldn't be able to function in anything we'd consider a society, imps are like dogs that can talk, and I imagine ogres' sheer fearsome size and vithracks' creepy mind powers would make people extremely unfriendly to them.

Wilder were used quite well to show colonialism and racism transcending species or nationality, with the Huana thinking nothing of steamrolling over lagufaeth just like the Rauataians and Vailians are doing to them. And being able to recruit some as crew members serves to highlight that point, with wilder serving alongside kith showing that boundaries between races, and even species, can be blurred

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The general idea of wilder seems to be that they're all just fundamentally incompatible with being "kith" in whatever way. Xaurips and lagufaeth in particular clearly occupy a space between ape and human on the intelligence scale and wouldn't be able to function in anything we'd consider a society, imps are like dogs that can talk, and I imagine ogres' sheer fearsome size and vithracks' creepy mind powers would make people extremely unfriendly to them.

Wilder were used quite well to show colonialism and racism transcending species or nationality, with the Huana thinking nothing of steamrolling over lagufaeth just like the Rauataians and Vailians are doing to them. And being able to recruit some as crew members serves to highlight that point, with wilder serving alongside kith showing that boundaries between races, and even species, can be blurred

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I think lots of people don't like the plot because it's a goes against genre expectations. If they played up the guardian of Ukaizo more and Eothas killing people less it might be more liked. I think it will wind up as a Far Cry 2 style situation, where in ten years it will be useful as a discussion piece about the genre.

As for the exploring aspect, the islands were too siloed/isolated/modular. As an example, I think they mechanically exceeded Raedric's Keep with the piano bomb quest, but like most of the quests it had a really weak lead-in. There was no Gilded Vale to make crushing Captain Benwick seem necessary. There weren't many times that one quest led to another quest, and extremely few quests that took players to multiple islands. That meant that a lot of times you didn't see minor consequences for minor actions. There was also no reason to go back to a place once you cleared the quests you got that took you there.

One thing that's super accurate here is the contrarian nature of Deadfire's writing. This really became apparent doing a second playthrough. But the writers just seem over-eager to always go against type. One example of this is the abundance of monster type creatures who are actually intelligent and can be civilized. This kind of twist works well with restraint. For example, Viconia stands out in BG, especially to DnD fans, partly because she's the only classically evil being that you can recruit. But in Deadfire this kind of twist is used ad nauseam -- there's an ogre you can recruit, a xaurip, an imp, a vithrack you can reason with, a lagufaeth you can reason with and on and on.

For one it kills the special nature that these twists would have had in a more restrained game. If there were only one or two non-kith crew members, that would make them special. Second, it also breaks much of the previous world building. If these "monsters" so frequently become civilized, why are there so many hostile, wild groups of them? Third, it's a cheap trick to make a quest, encounter or NPC interesting.

The general idea of wilder seems to be that they're all just fundamentally incompatible with being "kith" in whatever way. Xaurips and lagufaeth in particular clearly occupy a space between ape and human on the intelligence scale and wouldn't be able to function in anything we'd consider a society, imps are like dogs that can talk, and I imagine ogres' sheer fearsome size and vithracks' creepy mind powers would make people extremely unfriendly to them.

Wilder were used quite well to show colonialism and racism transcending species or nationality, with the Huana thinking nothing of steamrolling over lagufaeth just like the Rauataians and Vailians are doing to them. And being able to recruit some as crew members serves to highlight that point, with wilder serving alongside kith showing that boundaries between races, and even species, can be blurred

I mostly agree with house2fly.

I would like to point out, that this do not breaks anything from previous world building. This is true, that in the first PoE we didn't have so many of peaceful interactions with Wilders or other intelligent or semi-intelligent species (however there were such interactions possible - let's take Beregana's clan, to give just a one example).

It seems, that term the Kith is quite "antropo-centric", so to speak. It contains only most intelligent species, with in terms of intelligence and social behaviors (and largely anatomicaly too) are very similar to human. But I would say, that many of Wilders are not that much less intelligent than the Kith, despite of their "wilder" nature.

From other hand... there were some inconsequences in the first game already.

For examle, Delemganas were described as being on good terms with rangers, and generaly they are about only to protect their sacred places (more-less), hence not being agressive, or hostile by nature. But in practice, even if my hero was a ranger, only Delemganas I recall, that didn't want to kill me on sight were sisters at Twin Elms (well, at least one of them didn't want to kill me at sight).

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Also I realized post facto that what I'm saying might still be a little patronizing. I don't think all of people's reactions/complaints are invalid (there are lots and lots of fair criticism that I can see or agree with) , I just feel that many people aren't being entirely honest about why they have the opinions they do.

(snip)

I don't disagree that some of the backlash to TLJ was just simply that Star Wars fans wanted specific things and they weren't given those things and that upset them, perhaps this is why the incredibly mediocre retread that was TFA kind of got away with being so mediocre at least for a time. Though for me I was able to enjoy it more because at least the new characters were interesting and I wanted to see what would happen with them. I suppose you could compare that to some reactions to POE with people expecting Baldur's Gate 2.0 or whatever.

The thing is you are focusing a lot on change and fans hating things because of change, that's all very well but there are other criticisms. ME2 and 3 are no different there are many criticisms of the plot of those games that aren't nit picking at all. There is criticism of how side content was handled, there is criticism of how companions are used, how factions are used ect ect. There is also a lot of praise for those games. ME2 was still very successful and got a lot of praise and ME3 even did ok commercially. Even when the criticism is just about change, sometimes things don't need to be changed and some changes are not good, some ideas are not good ideas.

When I said it was too wordy I meant that there are times in Deadfire when certain words just aren't needed, especially in the fully voiced story moments I don't need to hear "berath said" every time Berath says something and having every movement of certain characters just seems unneeded too. Even if whether or not it annoys a person is subjective whether or not it is needed isn't, when it makes no difference other than adding extra fluff. I didn't notice this issue in POE but maybe that was because non of those lines were voiced.

I don't really think the Comparison between TLJ and Deadfire can really go that far to be honest. Deadfire doesn't attempt to go in a completely different direction to other games in it's genre IMO or even compared to the last game. I like Deadfire, I understand and agree with many of the criticisms but I like it. TLJ is just a very badly written Disney Movie to me, I don't really have an issue with subversion or deconstruction. I liked Kotor 2 for the way it criticised Star Wars (and no i'm not some Avellone fanboy). It's just the script, it was so terrible and nonsensical. Time and time again the plot was sacrificed because Rian wanted to subvert something and he couldn't be bothered to make it make sense. I don't think it's nitpicking to say that multiple scenarios in that movie make no sense. I've seen several videos that attempt to explain them and they just completely fail and devolve into attacking the people who didn't like the movie. I just don't really care if the star wars movie goes in a different direction or not and there were many examples of ways TLj could have gone in a different direction in a way that was meaningful but instead just kind of plays around with it and then drops it.

I don't see any of that kind of scenario for Deadfire because it doesn't make the same kinds of choices TLJ does and isn't getting the same kind of criticism. Nor is it getting the same amount of criticism.